Typically, clients and managers don't want to pay for design (or strategy) -- they want ‘results’! Too often, this leads to solutions that just don’t make sense and aren’t valuable to anyone.
Design sprints allow you to meet client's desire for quick, specific outcomes while making time to do things right. In this course, we'll show you how to plan and run situation-appropriate sprints to avoid waste and deliver value sooner. You'll explore how to do this across customer discovery, testing with Learn Startup, usability testing, and product architecture.
As a Project Management Institute (PMI®) Registered Education Provider, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business has been approved by PMI to issue 25 professional development units (PDUs) for this course, which focuses on core competencies recognized by PMI. (Provider #2122)
This course is supported by the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.

JM

If the lecture may speak a little bit slowly than he has, it will be much better. The content is very useful. And the questions at end of each session are very helpful for me to recap the course.

CK

Jul 21, 2018

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

This course really takes out the creativity from in terms of experiencing something before building them. I thank Mr Alex for providing in-depth knowledge and hand-on experience.

从本节课中

Testing Motivation in Design Sprints

None of us want to waste our time creating something no one wants, and yet just asking people what they want doesn't yield accurate results. Instead, you need to systematically assess user motivation so you can zero in on software implementations worth building. In this module, you'll learn to test user motivation with Lean Startup in a design sprint. You'll define key assumptions/hypotheses and brainstorm test vehicles for your peer-reviewed assignment. Plan to spend time reviewing your peers' assignments as well--it's a great way to learn and helps everyone get feedback quickly.

教学方

Alex Cowan

Faculty & Batten Fellow

脚本

We're going to walk through a few examples of how this systematic approach to innovation and how creative ideas about how to identify key assumptions and then test them in a scrappy creative way to figure out if you're driving a value. We're going to look at how this has worked out for a few consumer products. Then we'll have some business products. Dropbox started I think around 2007, and their idea was that these kinds of file sharing that you probably know Dropbox does now is something that they market once, they were products out there doing it but they just weren't very usable. Their proposition was if we build something that was very tightly tied to the underlying operating system and file systems of the major types of machines that people use, Macs, PCs, Android, iOS, then there would be widespread adoption of this technology and people would use it. So they went to the VC's because this was a big job and they needed money to do all this engineering and they said hey this is our idea, would you like to invest in it? And the VC's unfortunately said look there's a lot of competitors and those competitors aren't doing well so it doesn't look attractive to us, we we're going to pass. So here is the Dropbox set up and the terms we've looked at their early adopter was kind of applied digital innovation person so they work on a lot of software or advertising, production projects perhaps and share a lot of files and they have this problem and then we're using these certain alternatives, and here is our value proposition now. So, the question is given that they don't have a lot of money and time available and they have this sort of ambitious idea about what would be an awesome product. What could they do to prove or disprove, validate or invalidate this idea, so that then they could have the confidence to pull together the money somehow or otherwise work through it. And how could they do that without building any software. Well, here's what they did, and this is probably one of the most famous examples of the application of lean start up on these ideas. They created the used the Wizard of Oz, archetype for MVPs and they created an online demo that they posted on YouTube about what the Dropbox experience would be like, and then they took this video and they embedded in a page with a sign up action. And they drove traffic to it. And they initially drove traffic to it in their early market persona, this sort of techy person, and these kind of little points are really important. They catered references to math and science fiction and things that would make the video perfectly consumable. To the market at large, but that their early market, so they could get some initial traction, would feel like they were spoken to and they could kind of get a beach head there and get some sharing going. And it's just a good example of kind of paring some of these ideas we've talked about where we want to know who our user is, and what they care about, and what sort of generally makes them tick. With this idea of, we're going to really bring our proposition to life and figure out a way to test it. They got tons of sign-ups, went back to the VCs to raise money, and the rest is history. Zappos was started in 1999 so back then the idea that people would buy things online was not the foregone conclusion that it is today. So the founder had the idea to just take photos of shoes which he made an agreement at the local shoe store to do. Put them online in a very simple site and just see if people bought them. So he didn't go build a fancy commerce infrastructure or building to fulfil this somebody ordered a shoe he would just go down to the store, buy it, and ship it out to this person. Not scalable, not operationally tenable, but that wasn't the point. The point was not to scale a shoe selling operation before he knew whether such a thing was even going to be a valuable proposition. The point was to understand whether or not that was something valuable to do. So here is how this kind of lays out, in the terms we've been looking at if you're having trouble following these, there are links to them in the lesson materials. So basically, he thinks that if he offers this ability to buy shoes online, there's this certain person who knows what they want but can't get it at local retail, that would buy this. Maybe now they're using mail order or they wait until they go to the big city, but if they could buy it online that be better for them. So the minimum viable product for them was that they put these shoes online and just ship them, and then they scale up the business and the rest is history. Sprig is a more contemporary startup, and it's kind of a whole foods deli meets Uber so you can have these fresh, healthy, I think they may be organic, meals delivered to you wherever you are. So they felt there was an opportunity in this space to kind of go after this particular segment of buyer that would want this. And there were existing competitors, the fundraising process was slow, and scalable food prep and delivery, requires an infrastructure to do that. Now I am kind of who their market was in this terms here, but basically this is the material about who they were talking to, and what they wanted to do for them. And this is another kind of conundrum because you know a working infrastructure to cook and deliver food is a pretty big undertaking. So what would be an MVP that they could use? Well, it turns out, and one of the most interesting things is, I think they started this company on Sunday and did this on a Wednesday, they put together a temporary kitchen organization to make these meals. They didn't even really build a website. They just used, I believe, Eventbrite to put the meal up there that you could just buy as a ticket and have it delivered. And they emailed a bunch of friends and they observed who's buying it, were they people that they originally sent it to or people that those people shared this to and what was this experience like for them? Did the buyer like it? Not like it? How did they react to it? And this worked great for them and it was something that they were able to do well within the time parameters that we've set forth for this design sprint.